H is your health (also displayed in the upper progress bar). When it reaches 0 you are incapacitated.

S is your stamina (also displayed in the lower progress bar). For example when you run, use heavy armour etc it will decrease. If it gets too low you will have to wait a few seconds until you catch breath again

D is your defence. In areas where defence points are not supported, this number will not appear! You gain defence points when you survive a hard battle (not for winning a battle nor spending time fighting not hurting yourself). It does NOT indicate fighting experience or strength! Poor fighters can have received much defence from running away, good fighters can have zero defence indicating that they never need to run away

When you are hit you will see messages like

"Joe Black hits you (15/5) with Sword of Death (80%/12%)"

This means, Joe Black uses a melee weapon called Sword of Death, which tries to do 15 units of health damage and 5 units of stamina damage, but only 80% of health damage and 12% of stamina damage is actually delivered

Shielding, blocking, armour, helmets. If you wear shields, blocking devices, armour or a helmet this will reduce your sensitivity to attacks. To the right of your HUD you see up to 3 numbers (only when you wear the corresponding attachments): the upper is blocking/shielding strength, the middle is armour strength, the lowest is helmet strength. Touch them to get more information. In order to block actively or use a shield, press PG-DOWN or C

Your gender/race indicator. The races on a sim can be adjusted by the sim owner. You might see something different than described here. Over your head you see a tiny gender/race indicator. It displays a diamond for men, a triangle for women and four diamonds for beasts (like Kurii). This helps keeping the impact of floating text as low as possible, makes character information available for anybody and provides a check to see if the meter is worn.

Your name. By default for new users their name is displayed over the head. You can change this by typing /1ml name ANY_TEXT. It is possible to provide no text.

Good aiming with ranged and melee weapons as well will do a lot more damage. Run less, aim better, develop these skills is much more important than working on defence. Thus: more realism, more fun. Remember: headless clicking as fast as possible gives you a disadvantage against fighters who place their hits well!

Balance. MetaLife is a balanced meter. In the default configuration it does make differences between genders and races, but not in a way that gives generally disadvantage to certain persons. Women by default take more damage (except in regions with different configuration!) but therefore their stamina drops slower (they can run longer). Also under certain conditions they can raise their defence level.

Legality. Weapons that have too a high damage rate (i.e. they fire/attack too fast) are scaled down to a legal level. The same is true for all other weapon parameters (see developers section for details).

Fairness. MetaLife allows, roughly speaking, fast and weak weapons as well as strong and slow weapons. It is designed in way that combat between persons with any weapons is always fair (see the developer section for details).

Aiding. You can aid a fallen person by standing close, clicking on the surrounding sphere and holding the mousebutton down for at least a few seconds. Aiding will take time and drain your stamina. This encourages team play.

Death and unconsciousness. You cannot be killed without your agreement (drowning is an exception). Attacking a fallen person drains stamina and speeds up death/unconsciousness (so you can actively kill, whereas killing itself must be agreed on by the victim). By default you fall into unconsciousness. Please negotiate death RP yourself.

Illness and weakness. You can RP illness and weakness, resulting less maximal health and/or stamina. MetaLife offer options for this, but it is completely up to you to RP being ill/injured and being healed.

The MetaLife folder. When you first rezzed or attached the meter you got a folder with several items. Once you are familiar with ML and have read the manual you can have a closer look at the folder, but for the beginning it's not necessary.

Have fun and play fair! MetaLife has been designed to enhance RP, provide fair combat, assure legality of attacks and add much realism to your RP. If you are happy, we are happy. Please give us feedback so that we can improve the meter.